digital content

Market Your Hospital to Stand Out

Market Your Healthcare Facility to Standout from the Rest

Are you taking advantage of new opportunities for generating exposure?

When potential patients do not have a recommendation from family or friends on what healthcare professional or facility to use, they typically turn to conducting their own research online. This could entail using anything from search engines to social media – as long as the information they find is trustworthy and extensive.

Ensuring your healthcare facility is listed everywhere that potential patients are searching online is key to driving more traffic to your hospital website and therefore, more foot traffic.

Create content that educates

 Creating content that educates is beneficial for SEO, driving long-term traffic from search engines to your website. More importantly, quality content in the form of blog posts, articles and social media helps give value to readers and build trust between your patients and your facility.

Put yourself in the patient’s shoes when you write your material and then ask the following questions:

  • Can I easily interpret the information?
  • Are these health terms and definitions understandable, even if I was only 12 years old?
  • Is the content accurate and informative without being overwhelming?
  • Is the explanation sufficient?
  • Are all my questions answered?

Fun with Facts

Consumers like facts, especially in healthcare. Weave facts and statistics into appropriate content to complement the information.

The true beauty, however, is the simplicity. Health facts are short and to the point. They are easy to digest, easy to generate, easy to verify.

Video Marketing is Important

 Last, but certainly not least, spend time on video marketing to really stand out. Offer testimonials from your patients. Ensure they are genuinely interested in speaking on your behalf for more authenticity and effectiveness.  Create videos to introduce doctors and put a human touch to the faces patients will be seeing.

Utilize YouTube as a hub for your video marketing efforts online. Embed those videos throughout your website. YouTube is a search engine owned by Google, making your uploaded video content discoverable in search results and wherever the video is embedded (like your website.)

Again, just like the written content being produced for your web properties, your video content must educate your audience on your expertise in the healthcare industry.

Marketing for the healthcare industry doesn’t have to be difficult. We just need to think about who the target audience is, understand what information they want and of course how best to reach them. Let us do the thinking for you. Contact TotalCom today to learn more about our healthcare marketing options.

ABOUT JIMMY WARREN
Early to bed, early to rise, work like crazy and advertise! Jimmy Warren is president of TotalCom Marketing Communications with over 30 years experience helping many kinds of businesses build a strong brand. A large portion of that experience is in the healthcare industry.  He loves the ‘weird’, interesting and extremely talented people he gets to work with every day – that includes co-workers and clients. Outside of work he enjoys his grand kids, traveling and any kind of good ole fashion Alabama sports. Roll Tide!

Healthcare Marketing: Death of Newspapers – Implications for Marketers

As newspapers close, convert to more digital content or reduce the number of publishing days, the implications for marketers are significant.

Advance Publications has announced that the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register will all reduce their daily publications to only three times per week. This is a startling announcement in many ways.  These newspapers each have long histories, with the Mobile paper having published a daily for over a century. And it’s surprising for it to be happening in major markets like New Orleans and Birmingham.  This follows other newspapers that have either closed  (Tucson Citizen, Rocky Mountain News, Baltimore Examiner, Cincinnati Post) and others that have adopted hybrid online/print or online only models (Seattle Post Intelligencer, Detroit News/Free Press and the Ann Arbor News).

Despite the fact that some larger newspapers like the New York Times are seeing success with paid digital subscriptions and Warren Buffet recently made a $143 million investment in the newspaper business by purchasing the 63 newspapers owned by Media General, change is coming sooner rather than later for the news industry.

Printing on dead trees doesn’t make as much sense anymore. The harsh reality is that printed newspapers are no longer the dominant method of receiving news and information.  Twenty-four hour broadcast news networks and the internet make news reporting and the receiving of breaking news instantaneous.  It won’t wait till the print presses run. And the media habits of younger generations who depend on the web for almost all of their news will make print news even more obsolete.

For guys like me who look forward to reading the newspaper every morning, this is difficult to comprehend.  And as these changes occur, the implications for healthcare marketers are real and substantial.  Here are just a few ways marketers will be affected:

  • News provided to newspapers may not be published in a timely manner unless they offer a strong digital alternative. 
  • Digital and broadcast news do not offer the depth of information as newspaper.  It will be more difficult to explain complex issues
  • With fewer editions, the competition for space will be greater.  No more getting a story because it’s a slow day.
  • Newspapers will no longer provide the print frequency or timeliness for our advertising.
  • Advertising in digital and broadcast formats is much more limiting than print.  We will not be able to tell a story or deliver a message as completely as in a print ad.

In many ways, inevitable changes to the newspaper industry will make our jobs more difficult.  From the perspective of utilizing both earned and unearned media, we will have to adapt.  Adapt more to a digital age of reporting and messaging.  It will require a change for us all.